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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

ARTistic Pursuits Review

Art is something that is very important to me. I am a creative person and I always have some (read 20) crafty projects going on in my house. So as a homeschool mom I love teaching art to my children. My eldest son in particular (he's 9) loves to draw and has and entire drawer filled with "how to draw" books. A while back I decided to look online and find a curriculum that might help me introduce different artistic mediums and more knowledge of Visual arts to my children and I ran across the ARTistic pursuits website. I fell in love with their art curriculum, but it wasn't at a time where I could add anything to the course of study we were already doing. Imagine how excited I was when I got the opportunity to review their first book
Early Elementary K-3 Book one: An Introduction to the Visual Arts as part of the Review crew!

ARTistic Pursuits' book one is broken up into three sections: What Artists Do, What Artists See, and Where We Find Art. There are a total of 36 lessons separated into these three sections, so easily enough to last you through a school year. Each lesson has a section to read and learn about artist and art and then a project for you to do with your children. There is list a supplies to have on hand at the beginning of the book and then what you'll need for each project at the beginning of each lesson.

The lessons give your children a chance to think like an artist, and then translate those thoughts into their own artwork. There is also many full color prints of famous artwork through out the book that gives your children the opportunity to study artwork and see what emotions, subjects and mediums different arts have used in the past.

We have really been enjoying working on this curriculum together. Because it is geared for Kindergarten through Third grade (it says ages 5 and up) my 9, 7, and 4 year old all were eager to participate (so was the baby, but we mostly just let him color with crayons in the highchair as we talked). My 7 and 9 year olds were most fully able to understand all the subject matter, while the 4 year old enjoyed more participating in the art project portion of the lesson. For our family, art is never a subject that is boring or difficult to get my children to participate in, they were all eager for every new lesson and several times wished they could do another art project rather than work on reading, math or spelling.

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ARTistic Pursuits Early Elementary K-3 Book one: An Introduction to the Visual Arts is $47.95. I hope we'll be able to purchase the other books in the curriculum as well, I think ARTistic Pursuits will give your children a well-rounded study of art throughout their homeschool career. Click on the link below if you want to hear what other Crew members had to say about some of the other curriculum levels that ARTistic pursuits offers.